GMOs and “Unremitting Fraud” by Government Regulators in India concerning GM Mustard

Petition Filed for Contempt of Court Against Members of Genetic Appraisal Committee over GM Mustard

A
petition has been filed by activist and campaigner Aruna Rodrigues
against three persons of the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee
(GEAC). The GEAC is India’s apex regulatory body.

Rodrigues
is seeking the initiation of contempt proceedings for wilfully and
deliberately disobeying the explicit orders of the Supreme Court (SC)
8th May 2007, 15th February 2007, 8th April 2008 and 12th August 2008
and proceeding with numerous GMO field trials of GM mustard with the aim
of commercially introducing to India for the first time herbicide
tolerant (HT) food crops.

The case of GM mustard (DMH 11) is
critical since on the back of large-scale trials (LSTs), the application
for commercialisation was reportedly sent by the crop developer Dr
Deepak Pental of the Centre for Genetic Manipulation of Crop Plants to
the GEAC in Sept 2015. It is being considered for surreptitious approval
for commercialisation, according to newspaper reports.

As
LSTs are the final stage of trials before commercialisation and carry a
serious risk of contamination, the SC-appointed Technical Expert
Committee (TEC) requires that crop biosafety tests are first completed
prior to LSTs. The crop must then be signalled as utterly safe before
proceeding further. Biosafety studies and risk assessment protocols must
be addressed and completed during Biosafety Level I (BRL I) trials.
Then the process may move towards the next stage (BRL II). The petition
claims that these protocols were not adhered to.

Rodrigues argues that the
official regulators have hidden all data about GM mustard from the
public and the independent scientific community, against the
constitutional provisions and the orders of the SC, and have failed to
respond positively to requests for access to such data.

She claims that mandatory rigorous
biosafety protocols and independent and open scientific scrutiny have
not been carried out and the data pertaining to ‘mustard DMH 11’
therefore needs to be concealed. Moreover, there is clearly no data
online available from official sources in defiance of an SC order for
the public disclosure of all data.

The members of the GEAC are thus claimed to be in contempt of court because:

They have failed to provide public access to information, including
full biosafety dossiers, meeting minutes and safety dossiers, thus
side-lining court orders.

They have failed to implement biosafety measures during open field
trials to ensure no contamination, which for GM mustard is a serious
issue, as the petition makes clear. Enabling orders to prevent
contamination during trials were thus side-lined. Among other issues, no
active testing for contamination with validated protocols was done to
demonstrate regulatory commitment to contain risk under the supervision
of named scientists.

Regarding the second point, the petition states:

“A conscionable regulator would never have entertained
these trials. It is emphasised that these crops constitute the opening
up of a second front in GMO technology, i.e. HT crops, and with stealth,
which make[s] the contempt of orders with respect to these LSTs even
more unconscionable.”

The petition goes on to state:

“There is a great chasm between what is required for
proper GMO risk assessment & oversight, which prioritises bio-safety
and upholds the national interest, and what is taking place in India.
The regulatory vacuum constitutes deliberate malfeasance and fraud,
putting us at infinite and irremediable and irreversible risk.”

And driving home the point, the petition adds:

“… what we are now confronted with, in the specific
matter of Mustard DMH 11 and also LSTs of corn and flex cotton, all of
them HT crops, is more corrupt and even sinister because we have brazen
and repeated contempt including ‘underground’ approvals to keep the
biosafety fraud of these approvals secret and promote a clear agenda to
promote GMOs into Indian Agriculture. The Regulators and our
Institutions of GMO governance are ‘serial offenders’ without
compunction.”

The conclusion is that there seems to be
no room for science or transparency in this process. Approval of LSTs
of GM mustard point to the unrelenting determination of the regulator to
facilitate the market expansion of GM food crops despite the
incontrovertible evidence of serious hazards.

Contamination from field trials and
subsequent commercialisation means the impacts on biodiversity will be
irreversible. Rodrigues says that it is a matter of great perplexity
that the public interest can be allowed to be drowned by corporate power
in this way.

The GEAC’s reckless rush into GM foods,
unless checked, will have massive impacts on India’s farmers, their crop
choices, consumers’ food and health and on wild places and the
countryside. This secrecy and regulatory delinquency outlined here is
integral to accelerating the wider agenda of restructuring Indian
agriculture for the benefit of a Western agribusiness cartel (see this and this).

And this point could not be made any clearer by Rodrigues in the petition:

“The core problem is the proven
and pernicious conflict of interest which has pervaded the entire
system. In so far as Mustard DMH 11 is concerned, the Regulators,
Promoters, and Developers have stitched up every angle to facilitate the
commercialisation of this crop.”

Rodrigues proceeds to set out evidence
for this capture of government bodies and agencies by the pro-GMO lobby
to make her point (as indeed she has previously – see this).

Her concluding comments in the petition
make the situation clear in terms of India possessing an “utterly
delinquent regulatory system” and “unremitting fraud” where regulating
GMOs are concerned:

“The only recourse is to eliminate the peril of an
utterly delinquent regulatory system, through a full moratorium on GMOs…
We are well beyond the point when the Precautionary Principle must be
applied, because the build-up of evidence of environmental and health
hazards points to unremitting fraud in the regulation of GMOs… This
technology is a classic case of ‘unforeseeable systemic ruin’, which
means that we will know we are ruined after it happens. As they say, the
dead cannot make a comeback.”

See this previous piece on GM mustard in India for background information and some wider implications